504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

There’s a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I’m writing a character where I put myself in their place.

They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn’t help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It’s always there, though.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, ‘Middlesex.’

When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one.

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness”, “joy”, or “regret”. Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions.

In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn’t name.

I’m not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness.

Just when she’d got her head on straight, her body started falling apart.